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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

OK, fans of my website will remember that I did a series called "Witless on Lothar" way back when, and I realized that I could easily collect them and put them in book form for sale on Amazon, so i did. And when I finished, I realized, "This is not erotica, there's only two sex scenes and they're only a few paragraphs long."

What they were, actually, was political satire. It was all about the contrast between the protagonists (political pundit Anne Coaltar) highly politicized view of the world and the barbaric (and really dumb and unbelievable) reality of Gor. Then former presidential candidate Hilarity Clanton winds up being First Girl in the slave kennels where Anne winds up, because "Duh!"

It was so much fun to write. I'm hoping it will be as much fun for others to read.

Here's the blurb:

When political pundit Anne Coaltar wakes up on a strange new world naked and chained to a huge rock after what must have been a hell of a party, she naturally assumes it's a practical joke. Or perhaps that it's one of those dreams where you think you are awake but really are not. But when she's accosted by hard-looking alpha males who look like they stepped out of a Renfair and subjected to indignities that outstrip ANYTHING she had ever suffered at the hands of even the most rabid democrat, Anne realizes this MIGHT be more than a joke, or a dream. If it is a dream, it is a very NAUGHTY dream.

But this is just the BEGINNING for Anne, as she's drawn farther and farther into this dream, or world, or most likely, democratic plot to discredit her. Anne winds up in a slave kennel and discovers that her superior in the slave kennel hierarchy is none other than Hilarity Clanton, her greatest enemy and candidate for the US Presidency!

It it all a dream, a subconscious demon brew of repressed lust and desire that runs counter to Anne's every conservative desire? Is it a democratic plot to discredit Anne? Or is it a science fiction reality that has launched her across the stars only to be confronted with something out of a medieval fantasy?

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

So, up until July of this year, Amazon was encouraging its authors to participate in a program called Kindle Unlimited, which allows readers, for a $10 monthly fee, to load books onto their kindles (or kindle readers for Windows, Mac and Android computer and devices) for free, if they are in the program.

Amazon threw money into the pot to make it a good deal for writers. How good a deal? Well if you sell a short story for $2.99 and opt for 70% royalties, you get about $2.02 on every sale. A borrow on Kindle Unlimited gets you about $1.35, provided the borrower reads 10 percent of the books. (That's right, Amazon knows, not just which books you read, but what percentage of the books you borrow that you actually read. But wait, it gets worse!)

There's less money for a Kindle Unlilmited borrow than for a sale, but since the people who belong to Kindle Unlimited typically don't buy books, it's extra sales, or as they say in comics, "Ka-Ching!" KU has been a good addition to the income I get in sales, in fact, it runs about equal to my sales worldwide (that's right .. people in England, Germany and Australia buy my books, among other countries!). Some people have done GANGBUSTERS on KU, though, with borrows outpacing sales 10 to 1. "Ka-Ching!" indeed!

The catch for KU, as far as authors are concerned, was that in order to have a book in the program, you had to publish it only on Amazon. Exclusivity was the price, but it was still a pretty damn good deal, and most authors went with it. Once again, "Ka-Ching!"

That was true until this July, when Amazon implemented a new Kindle Unlimited compensation plan: authors get paid for every page a reader reads, not every book a reader borrows. How much do they get paid? Half a cent. (Ok, the actual number for July was $0.0057791577669113). For most erotica writers this means a huge decrease in income, because most erotica is in the form of short stories, and short stories have fewer pages to be read.

But it's not just a matter of how many pages get read ... there's also the matter of linger. Linger is Amazon measuring how long you spend reading each page. If your readers don't linger over a page long enough, you don't get your half penny for it. So Amazon knows how many pages you read, and how long you spend on each page. I imagine that must give a lot of erotica readers the creeps, thinking of Amazon metaphorically peering over their shoulders as they read. If you're an erotic speed reader, be sure and take a break every five so I get my KU2 credits!

The new KU payment system, dubbed KU2, cut the incomes of a lot of erotica writers severely, since they mostly write short stories. Being adaptable sorts, erotica authors are changing their game. Those with a lot of stories in their bibliography (some have hundreds) are "going wide" which means they are selling to markets other than Amazon. The theory being that with much less income from KU2, Amazon's exclusivity is no longer something they are willing to put up with.

But they aren't pulling out of KU2 wholesale, because of another little "catch" to the KU2 program. When you enroll a book in KU2 (or in the old KU, for that matter) Amazon's search algorithms are optimized to make your KU2 book more visible than books that are not enrolled in KU2. That's not just for Kindle Unlimited searches, that's for ANY searches. So your book is going to be a lot more visible, and hence sell more copies than it otherwise would have, if it's in KU2.

The strategy I plan to adopt, which I picked up on a Reddit author's forum, will be to put all my new books in KU2 initially and keep track of them. If they sell well, I will keep them in KU2 for as long as they sell well. When and if sales tank, I'll go wide with the books.

I like going wide for its own sake. Giving Amazon exclusivity is a bad thing in and of itself. I tried to convince other erotic authors of this back before KU2 but was roundly ignored. Now that KU2 has changed everything for them and hurt their sales, a lot more erotic authors are going wide. Now that Amazon has altered their deal, they see that Amazon might alter it again, and again, in anyway they like, and if Amazon is the only functional marketplace for ebooks remaining, they are pretty much in the position of the young lady pictured at the top of this post.

Monday, September 21, 2015

Well, simple enough: our Simon Legree of a landlord sold the house we were renting out from under us because real estate prices in the neighborhood we were living in have been going through the roof, and he made a bargeload of bucks. He gave us notice, but the unexpected expense and hassle has been a total PITA. Very much modern America, I guess.

I've been spending the last two months frantically searching for housing, getting us packed, and getting us moved. I've had to put writing and publishing on the back burner for this period, as in, "not doing any of either."

We're in a smaller but very nice living space now, paying a little more for rent, but not much. And I'm back in the writing and publishing game, as subsequent posts will demonstrate. But in the meantime, the game has changed, and as I result, I've had to make some changes, too.